Wednesday, 14 December 2016

Knowing The Future

In our experience, the present moment is a single instant of immediate awareness separating a partly known past from a mostly unknown future. How much do we know about the future? Other things being equal, stars and planets will continue to move in predictable orbits while entropy increases.

Maybe time travelers should know more? Particularly Wellsian and Andersonian time travelers? (Not Jack Finney's time travelers. They are just interested in the past although one of his stories shows futurians migrating to their past, our present.)

Before tackling time travel, there are some intermediate cases. James Blish's post-Okies learn, by scientific observations, that the matter and anti-matter universes will collide on a specific date so they try to reach the Metagalactic Center before that date but they do not receive any Dirac messages from themselves having arrived at the Metagalactic Center because that would be possible only inthe The QuincunxOf Time timeline where Service experts try to write a complete history of the future although their data are always insufficient and never fully comprehensible.